This is the right answer. I certainly wouldn't say that Lemmy is "for" programmers, but it attracts a certain kind of audience, doesn't it.
dressupgeekout
joined 3 years ago
It all started with my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that we needed to buy for school. When I realized it was exactly the same way to make your own games, I learned ActionScript 2.0 to make early Adobe Flash interactive thingies. Then I wanted to make computers do "real" things, beyond the sandbox that is a Flash program. That's when I picked up Bash, and then Ruby, and then C... eventually you can fast forward to today, where I make a living as a build engineer working on the code for speakers and headphones!
"Please leave."
Also consider: people praise Rust's commitment to memory safety. And there have been some devastating, high-profile bugs in recent memory that were caused by memory leaks in a C library or whatever.
You could blame C for those disasters, if you like -- OR you could recognize that it is so much more practical to fix memory leaks in a C/C++ program than it is to uproot the whole thing and rewrite in Rust, or switch whatever you're working on to a Rust-centric universe.
That alone accounts for a lot of the inertia which slows down the super-wide adoption of Rust, I'd wager.
C is "old," sure, but not at all antiquated. So much important, infrastructural software continues to be written in C to this very day. It's never going away. It's not smart to replace/rewrite all software written in C with something else just for the sake of using a "newer" or "modern" language. The most popular C and C++ compilers today are actively maintained and SUPER advanced, having been based on 40+ years of experimentation and experience!
Also, there is a C compiler for, like, almost literally every CPU instruction set ever created. Currently, Rust compilers do target an admirable set of platforms, but it will NEVER be on par with the set of computers you can program for in C. And for many applications, Rust simply is not an option. Especially in embedded and industrial settings, where huge changes raise more questions than answers them, and where adopting new technologies is super slow on purpose because stuff HAS to work and interruptions are not tolerated. Lots of trepidation in a factory, or in avionics hardware and other critical stuff like that -- less so in someone's desktop PC.
It's far easier to port C, in general. When new platforms, new instruction sets inevitably come around, it will be a C compiler which will be written for it first -- purely because of how straightforward the language is, how it was designed from the beginning to be easy to translate into assembly. So, while the design of Rust and its compilers may have some cool and compelling features, it is (in my view) always more expedient (and therefore smarter?) to hit the ground running with a new platform with a C compiler first.
TL;DR there will always be a place for C and C++. There never won't be, from a practical perspective, because it is utterly ubiquitous. I'm sure Rust will succeed, but it cannot displace C/C++, because nothing can.
Yes they're open source. They're also not terribly interesting and I haven't updated them in many years, but maybe I should fix that!
https://github.com/dressupgeekout/pless https://github.com/dressupgeekout/pres
I plan on doing exactly this when I visit Alaska next year!
Too true
Well, you're wanting to write a TUI in the first place, which (arguably) means you're not really looking for "state of the art" or "modern" -- if you see what I mean.
And if one wants to write a TUI app, then curses is the most natural and least bloated way I can think of to make that happen.
And you don't need to resort to writing your app in C -- lots (most?) programming languages have bindings to curses. I've written a curses app in Ruby, for example.
I wouldn't call curses/ncurses "old." There are multiple implementations that are maintained to this day, and they work perfectly well.
I like the sound of all of this
Re: Deviantart clone: There's been talks about adding ActivityPub features to MediaGoblin, which could be interesting. But I personally believe that making something new that was designed with federation from the start would be better.